Hands-On Windows 213 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a look at an expansion of something called AutoSR in Windows 11.

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Paul Thurrott [00:00:16]:
Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Thurrott, and this week we're going to take a new look at a technology called AutoSR, or automatic super resolution. So this was something that Microsoft added to Windows 11 for Windows 11 on ARM and the Snapdragon X processors that Qualcomm is making, um, because they wanted a way to get over that last kind of compatibility hump when it comes to running emulated apps and games and things, right? Um, one of the problems with ARM as a platform on it with Windows anyway, is that Games are written for classic x86-style processors, right? The ones that are made by Intel and AMD. And that's not going to change anytime soon, if it ever changes. And so, um, Snapdragon X, X2 processors running Windows 11 ARM could run basically every Windows app on earth, no matter how it's written. Most everything just works perfectly fine. It's great. But games, you know, are a special problem.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:22]:
So Microsoft has a technology based on DirectX that any developer can use. If you're a game developer, anyone can use this, but you have to opt into it. And so with AutoSR, the auto obviously means automatic, it's a way to automatically apply super resolution to games, meaning what you can do is run the thing at a lower resolution, but visually, because AI is upscaling the image on the fly, it looks like you're running it a higher resolution. And the reason you do that is because if you run a game at a lower resolution without the upscaling, I mean, it would normally look terrible, relatively speaking, but it would run faster, right? You get faster frame rates. But if you can get the faster frame rates and still have it look good, it's kind of like that awesome win-win. In Snapdragon X Windows 11 on ARM, you know, it doesn't work with every game automatically. There's some manual things you can do to try to get games to work. It's optimized for 700p, meaning You want to set the resolution of the game to be something under whatever resolution where it's, you know, 1368 or whatever, 1366 by 768 is a little over 700p, right? Because that's like 768p, but anything under that, like 1280 by whatever, would be a good value.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:38]:
And it works pretty good. You know, the game situation on Windows 11 on ARM is never going to be great, frankly, or at least not with Snapdragon X processors. It isn't. But, you know, one of the questions in there is like, okay, but we have all these other computers. In fact, 90-something percent of computers out in the world are not running Windows 11 on ARM or on Snapdragon X processors. What about the rest of us? You know, and Microsoft, out of the blue, they kind of hinted at this, you know, 2 years ago, but, you know, radio silence ever since, came out and said, actually, we've brought it to now the latest generation of Intel processors. Right. So let me look at my Actually, let me do this a little differently.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:18]:
If you look at the system settings on this computer, you can see this is an Intel Core Ultra X7-385H. This is actually one of the better processors, but what this is is an Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processor, which is codenamed Panther Lake, and that's the chipset that Microsoft has made AutoSR available on. This particular chip has incredible graphics built in, this Arc The B390 integrated GPU is awesome. I could play modern Call of Duty, great frame rates, really high quality. So, I mean, technically I don't actually need, you know, this kind of technology on this computer, but, you know, I did want to give it a shot just to kind of see what it was like. And I was curious, you know, what does AutoSR do for a platform that already runs games really well? Right. If you are familiar with AutoSR, you may know that in Windows 11 on ARM, Um, you go to System Display and then down to Graphics. And down to Graphics, he said.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:17]:
Um, and you'll see it here as an option. Now in Windows 11 on ARM, I want to say this is actually on by default. Uh, I'm not really sure, but on x86 versions of Windows, uh, it's not there anyway, usually. Um, in this case, what you have to do is install the AutoSR app from the store. Eventually, I think it will just be built into Windows 11. It doesn't make sense that it wouldn't be. Um, and then you get these additional options that you see here. Um, uh, this stuff in here, and then the ability to kind of add apps and games actually, um, to this list and then customize them individually.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:51]:
So for example, the game I'm going to run in a moment is Doom Eternal, which is, um, probably 4 or 5 years old at this point, but as a modern game is really, really nice looking, et cetera. So I've, it's set to be on. Um, this is the default setting for this. I, if you're playing, if this is a game, you're always going to want it to be on the best graphics, but actually changing that shouldn't change anything. It's just going to work that way. So there's not really a lot you can do here. Um, but the other thing is you don't necessarily have to do this. So the way that this works is, um, you install a game and you run it.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:24]:
And I'm going to do that in a moment. You'll see there's going to be a popup, like a notification at the bottom of the screen that says, hey, you're using AutoSR. Awesome. Everything's great. And what that means is you've configured it correctly. So what I had done beforehand was go into the game and configure it for a relatively low resolution. I also did some benchmarking with just frames per second just to see what it was like. You know, on this computer, Doom Eternal at normal res, pretty high quality graphics across the board, gets tremendous frame rates.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:54]:
But I went in and I just changed it to a lower resolution just to kind of see what this would look like. I have to say, I was actually pretty surprised. It's pretty good. And in this case, it's not so much that the frames— the frame rate went up per se, although I guess it probably did a little bit, but it's more that when AutoSR is enabled and you run it at that lower resolution, I can't tell. It looks to me like it's running at the native resolution of the screen. And that effect is actually way better on the internal display on this laptop that I'm using. I'm using an external display for this and for recording. So Um, you know, we'll see how that goes.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:30]:
All right. So let me, let me start the game and then you can kind of see. All right. Let's see how this goes. All right. So I'm going to run Doom Eternal. That was the game I mentioned, right? Um, it's going to take over the screen, obviously. Well, it doesn't have to actually, but, uh, but it will.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:51]:
Yeah. So now we get the auto SR is on. Uh, notification, like I said, and that tells me that this is going to work correctly, right? It means that I went in and changed it enough where that, you know, makes sense for this to work, right? So AutoSR will in fact work on this thing. It's only running at 13, I think it's 1366 by 768, which is a 16 by 9 aspect ratio, right? Um, which is, you know, usually want to keep it to the same aspect ratio as the screen. Um, In this case, AutoSR on Core Ultra Series 3 is good for 800p, but actually up to 1020p. I don't have a jo— usually I would play this with an Xbox controller, but that's okay. And it's square, so I don't actually have it on— it's not filling the screen, but that's okay. Let's continue the game just to give you, just to give you a peek at this.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:42]:
It's kind of interesting. There will be once it loads. It just takes a little while. All right, here we go. All right, so this is just the beginning of the game, nothing special. But yeah, it's also square. So actually the resolution or the aspect ratio changed while I was not looking at it. But that's okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:07]:
You can get an idea for this. So even though this is running at a really low resolution for today, I think you can see there's some good Detail just about everywhere, like this smoke effects, fire effects. You can get up here against the, the grain of the wood on this thing. I mean, this is— this looks like it's running at— well, this display is not 2.8K, but the one inside the laptop screen is. It's— it looks like it's a much higher res screen than it is, and I just, I love that. So, you know, this is an interesting— I'm just going to get out of there now because it's loud, but it's an interesting It's— I feel like this is a blind test, uh, thing where you could show someone this and say, what do you think? What do you think this is doing? And I, I think that visually this would fool a lot of people. Um, it's good on Windows 11 on ARM where it's really needed. It's kind of amazing to me that this is essentially not counting, you know, portable workstations and so forth, the gaming laptops, kind of the most powerful laptop you can buy today.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:08]:
It's got integrated graphics. Yes. But in that In that world, like, this is about as good as it gets. And you would think, well, it doesn't really need this, but anything you can do to reduce resource consumption is pretty cool. And as more games come out over time, like, this will be able to upscale those as well, right? And so there might be games down the road where maybe this wouldn't run so well on this laptop, but now it can. So I'm really excited about this. There's a a kind of hit-or-miss aspect to it. In this case, I actually hit and missed several times before I got to a game that just worked like I showed you.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:46]:
I sort of figured just maybe this would make a bigger difference on maybe an older game. I installed Quake, which, you know, was recently remastered and had new levels added to it, and I installed Half-Life, which, you know, got a— I think it was a 20th or 25th anniversary update a couple years back, and it's beautiful and runs really high res and it looks great, but it didn't do anything with those. I added them manually in different ways here. You can see those here and I just never really got it to work, but Doom Eternal just worked right out the gates. I know the new Doom, Doom: The Dark Ages also works great and automatically. So if you install that, if you play that game, like you'll see it there as well. And Microsoft recommends various games, but honestly, I would say most modern games work pretty well and most people don't have laptops that are actually this powerful. So.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:34]:
This should improve the gaming situation, you know, for just about everyone. It's really kind of cool. So useful. And hopefully in the future, and there's hints of this now, we'll see it come to other Intel chipsets, you know, older or different Intel chipsets, and also AMD, of course, right? This is the type of thing that should benefit anybody, and I think will in the near future. But if you do have this latest gen chipset in one of your laptops, You should give this a try. It's really cool. And you play games, of course. Alrighty.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:04]:
Uh, hopefully that was useful and interesting. Um, we will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about the podcast at twit.tv/how. Uh, thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to Club Twit. We love you guys. If you're not a member, check it out, uh, twit.tv/clubtwit, support the channel. Um, keep everybody employed.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:27]:
You know, it's a great— it's a great system, um, and it's a great community. So give— please, at least give it a— give it a look. Um, and thank you so much. I'll see you next week.

Speaker D [00:11:39]:
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